


Meet Me at Fifty Centigrade

by Seiberwing



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Asexual Character, Asexual Mick Rory, Class Issues, Earth-2, Fire, Firespinning, Genderfluid Minor Character, Incidental Werewolf, M/M, Mayor Lisa Snart, Metahuman Leonard Snart, Metahuman Mick Rory, Metahumans, Original Character(s), Politics, Reestablishing Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-02
Updated: 2017-01-19
Packaged: 2018-09-14 07:10:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 21,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9167728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Seiberwing/pseuds/Seiberwing
Summary: Slightly charred firefighter Mick Rory finally gets back in touch with his former partner in crime, now the campaign manager to Central City’s newest mayor. Class barriers are hard to vault, old grudges even harder, but Mick and Len might just be able to pull it off.Therefore, it's not a great time for the particle accelerator to explode. Mick hits hypothermia, Len runs a fever, and the newly reforged bonds between them get a little weirder.





	1. Playing Politics

**Author's Note:**

> I started this fic, which by wordcount legally counts as a novella, in the middle of LoT season one. The unnecessarily long period it took to write it was broken up by periods of fanatic revision, having others review early portions, or forgetting it existed. If I hadn't put so much work into it I might have never put it up at all. Strap in, you'll be here a while.
> 
> My earlier fic "PR Thief" was a draft of the first chapter put out for Coldwave Week 2016, so if you've read it you can consider it a sneak peek for this fic.

It didn’t count as lurking like a creeper if you were sitting on a bench. Benches were meant to be sat on. If the bench happened to be across the street from the Nativebrook Art Museum where the dark cars of important men and women pulled up to the curb and were taken away by valets once they expelled their precious cargo, that was completely a coincidence.

Mick hadn’t called ahead. He wanted to see what Len would do if he had to deal with Mick existing in his vicinity in front of his rich asshole friends. Shun him, maybe even protect his precious image by having Mick carried out by security. That would at least show that the wall between them was finally unclimbable. It was better than all this damn waiting.

Another car pulled up and Mick leaned forward, tugging absently at his unbuttoned cuff. The shirt he’d put on, the nicest shirt he owned for the little that said about it, had been left open at the collar to show where his burned skin reddened and rippled below the neck. Couldn’t let Len ignore that bit either. Mick didn’t consider himself disfigured but he know the rich idiots would, and he wanted to see if Len would feign agreeing with them.

Ah. There he was.

At least one thing hadn’t changed: Len looked damn good in a suit. Back when he got them from used clothing stores so he could infiltrate office buildings, his ability to swagger like he owned the room made it difficult to notice the way they didn’t quite fit him. Len still had the swagger even when the suit was custom tailored for him, and one could almost mistake him for still being a cocky thief.

The crowd poured in to meet him, and Mick’s fist tightened.

Len was doing the shoulder pat, that little hand-squeeze and shoulder pat of feigned familiarity. Len never did the shoulder pat because he only touched you when he wanted you to know that he could easily break you. The same went for the false laugh because when Len was laughing _with_ you it was a soft chuckle and a quick grin, never a lingering laugh that faded from a guffaw into silence over the course of two breaths and could be heard from across the street. And that smile was so damn soft, made Mick feel sick to look at.

They’d been friends, once, between Len started getting ideas above his station. Very close friends with very good benefits, though not _that_ kind of benefits, because to be blunt Mick didn’t go in for that kind of thing.

Then Len, the bastard, decided to make the jump from theft to politics. He moved in ritzier circles and wore nicer suits, and Mick found himself calling Len less and less. It was hard to talk with him about anything. Len thought about PR and economic policies and bribery. Mick still thought about free beer. Mick found himself spending what everyone else used as their date nights drinking his frustration away at the Flower Shop nominally-gay bar catcalling its Tuesday night drag shows.

There’d been less and less of friendship and the benefits eventually dried up completely. Calls stopped. Sometimes Len’s sister Lisa sent him a smiley face text or a goofy selfy, and on very rare occasions Mick sent back a ‘heh’ in response, and that was it. Then, nothing.

Mick stood, and with his hands in the ratty pockets of his jeans began to cross the street. 

“Hey! Len!” Not as loud as he wanted. Damnit, he wasn’t ashamed, why the hell should he be?

Len paused. His head flicked to the right and those piercing eyes locked on to him. (He could never tell what color they were, no matter how close he’d found himself to them when they huddled against the wall of a storage closet, something along the spectrum of grey and blue and green and ice.) 

Mick met his eyes and waited a beat, staring Len down with tensed muscles. Waiting for Len to make a gesture to his muscle, or just turn back around and ignore him.

And then, his face to the camera, Len smiled and it was so sharp you could cut your fingers on it, flashed only for a moment and only for him.

“Mick. It’s been a while.”

_That_ was Leonard Snart’s smile. 

They entered the museum shoulder to shoulder, a cocky swagger next to a casual saunter. “Didn’t think you cared for art,” Len said as they passed the door guard that narrowed his eyes at Mick but said nothing. His voice still had that drawl in it that reminded Mick of a twenties gangster with a tommy gun.

“I don’t. But I heard some good things about the guest speaker.”

“Really. I heard he was a real bastard.” The way Len rolled the crass word across his tongue made the tension start to drop out of Mick’s shoulders. At least he could still swear. There was some bit of Len left inside that suit, if he could still swear. 

As they entered, Len was immediately beset by another group of suits eager to welcome him and ask after him, and off went that disgusting shoulder pat and soft smile again. Mick tried to step to the side but every time he took one step away Len took one step to follow him, refusing to let him vanish into the crowd.

By the time they’d side-stepped their way off to the buffet table with its metal trays of steaming mini hotdogs Len was standing with his back to Mick as if to shield him from raised eyebrows and judging looks.

“Back in a moment,” he muttered over one shoulder. “Don’t go through the entire open bar until I get a shot at it.”

Len flowed through the crowd like a patient shark and ascended his way to the podium. He told one or two poor jokes that neglected to have a single mention of genitalia and then recited some pabulum about youth enrichment. Mick lurked by the buffet eating his way through a sapling’s worth of toothpicked meats and being cautiously shunned by everyone else. The champagne was weak as piss, so he made sure to drink at doubletime to compensate. Len went down a gauntlet of shaken hands as he descended, until he was back by Mick’s side again and being ignored in favor of a gaggle of dancing costumed children singing in a language Mick neither understood or cared about.

“Doesn’t all that gladhanding make your wrists tired?” Mick grunted.

Len lowered his voice, letting it be hidden by the blaring trumpets and drums. “I find it helps if you think of them as marks. It’s good to see an honest face around here, at least. But the booze really isn’t worth the trip out. What really brought you over?”

Mick took a hard bite out of a food item stuffed with a different kind of food item, neither of which he could properly identify. “Wanted to see Leonard Snart in his natural element,” he said in a gruff, food-muffled voice. 

“This isn’t my element, Mick. This…” Len turned away from the crowd to give a dismissive wave to his suit, then set his face into a media-pleasing grin and gave it a similar wave. “This is my gear. That out there’s the heist. Me and Lisa, we’re the crew. All I did was train myself enough to blend in and make them think I’m their type.” That voice. That sneer in audible form. That purr that Mick would have once followed into hell itself to make off with Satan’s jewelry stash.

“So what’s your type now?”

Len grabbed a glass of champagne and threw back half of it like it was cheap whiskey. “Same as it ever was. A crook, a thief, a con man. Now I’m just one who’s decided that stealing material objects wasn’t enough of a challenge and set his sights on more abstract prizes.”

An old white man in a tux who looked like the embodiment of what Lisa called ‘privilege’ after that college education started going to her head wandered towards them. 

“Leonard _Snart_ , good to _see_ you, what a _great_ cause you’re _working_ with here.”

The false smile snapped onto Len’s face so fast it was unsettling. “Alderman Blood! Glad to hear you’re a patron of the arts.” The handshake was hearty, shoulders were patted, and Blood’s own smile was nearly identical. It was like room full of masks that no one wanted to admit were there. Creepy as shit, in Mick’s opinion.

“Same, Lenny, just the same. How’s Mayor Lisa Snart?” He pronounced Lisa’s new title as if it was something she’d put on for a lark.

“Cutting the ribbon at STAR Labs’ newest shiny toy. I’m really hoping it doesn’t end the universe, you know? I like living here.”

“Haha, me too, me too.” Blood was practically saying the ‘haha’, like a bad actor reading off a script.

Len clapped his hand to Mick’s shoulder. “And of course you remember Michael Rory,” Len said, ever so casual. “From Prothero’s talk back in March at the university?”

The alderman blinked, smile almost falling before he snapped it right back on again. “Of course, it’s great to see you again, Mr. Rory,” he said, offering his hand for another shake. Mick stared at it, then cautiously took it.

“Yeah…”

“You’ve been well?”

“Pretty dandy.” The alderman was forcibly unphased by Mick’s rough mumble, or the rippled skin on his wrist, as he turned back to Len.

“By the way, Len, I was wondering if we could have a quick chat about the Glades zoning issues?”

“Love to, but I’ve got somewhere to be after this. Why don’t I have lunch set up and we’ll go over it a little more in depth?”

“Great, great. I’ll catch you then.” The alderman swanned back off to the rest of the gathering, to break into a conversation between two women in dresses that looked just ridiculous enough to be high fashion.

“Who the hell’s Prothero?” Mick mumbled out of the corner of his mouth.

“Absolutely no one,” Len whispered back.

“I’ve never met that guy in my life, Len.”

Len turned his back to the room and the real smirk returned again. “You definitely haven’t. It’s amazing how much you can get marks to dance when they want something from you.”

Marks, huh. Mick rolled his eyes and finished his champagne, then plucked the glass from Len’s fingers and finished that one too. “How long before we can blow this joint?"

Len slowly craned his neck to one side, seemingly to stretch, indicating a side door just behind the sliding wall concealing the rest of the museum. “That performance is going on for the next half hour. Who says we have to leave?”

The tension between them began deflating as soon as they were out of public view. Len’s nice shoes clicked softly on the tiled museum floor as they walked past the darkened paintings, Mick’s boots making soft thuds alongside him. Mick read the little labels next to the pieces and wondered how much the seemingly meaningless smears of color on canvas would be worth in dollar signs. Len almost certainly knew. A quick jimmying of the maintenance door lock by Len took them into the back room, beneath the thick steam pipe that tangled with sprinkler pipes above a large fuse box.

The whirr of the HVAC muffled the sound of the chattering movers and shakers of Central City. Len was looking at him expectantly, waiting, and all the angry things Mick had wanted to say cleared out of his head. He tried to find something to denounce and mock, but Len was just standing there being a target.

Mick took a deep breath. "Look, Len, I–”

Then, though Mick wouldn’t know the instigator of the flash and the roar and the shock of burning cold until far later, the particle accelerator blew up.


	2. Ice

Everyone in Central City remembered where they were the night their world changed. Some could mark the moment they’d seen that bright wave of light radiating across the skyline like a tidal wave, or felt the windows rattle and car alarms screech from the shockwave. 

Others only remembered because they’d counted the hours backward from when they’d gotten that phone call, or seen the news, and frantically scrambled to recall the last time they’d told their wife or husband they loved them.

Some knew in a moment that they’d changed. For others, it took weeks or months. Some died, and only came back when the shouting was all over with bodies of metal, tar, or electricity. Some watched the bodies of their friends warp and shred, then weave themselves into something entirely new.

Mick Rory remembered the cold.

A few years earlier he’d donated platelets to the Red Cross to get a double entry to win a free case of Steigler Ale in a blood drive raffle. The nurse had put one needle in each arm and sucked the blood out of his left one, circulated it through the machine to take the platelets out and then pumping it back into his right one. He’d lain there with arms immobile, bored and cranky, and watched the first hour or so of _Die Hard_ while the nurse offered him sips of hot coffee through a straw. By the time his blood got back from its journey it had cooled to room temperature and it had left him chilled to his core in a way that coats couldn’t ward off.

That bone-deep, soul-deep cold was the cold he felt when he woke up at the hospital. What he remembered of the past evening—the flash, the explosions, the hands clenching against his own, and then the ice inside his bones that felt like it was ripping him apart as his breath seemed to freeze inside his throat—made it seem like a balmy summer day.

He was restrained hand and foot to what felt like a folding cot, covered in thick blankets that were only somewhat taking the edge off the lingering chill beneath his skin. The lights above him were a sterile bright white against the dusty ceiling tiles. He turned his head to see the hem of cheap blankets hanging down over a metal frame on casters, then looked up to three hospital beds pressed close in a room likely intended for two. Underneath the beds he could see a pair of no-skid sneakers below the hems of nurse’s scrubs.

“Hey,” he mumbled, tugging at the restraints.

The sneakers’ owner, a man who looked half Mick’s age and almost as jaded, glanced at him over the bed. “Oh. Hey, there.” He had the sort of bags under his eyes you saw on a procrastinating PhD student the day before an exam. “Not dead yet?”

Mick made a show of considering it, shifting his head side to side thoughtfully. “Mmm. Nope. Where the hell am I?”

“Our Lady of Mercy Hospital. You came in last night.” The nurse came around to the other side of the closest hospital bed and inspected the monitors hooked up to its inhabitant. His scrubs were decorated, inexplicably, with little smiling irons and washing machines on a paisley background. He was holding a tablet with the hospital’s name written on the back.

“Us and half the kk-kk damn city,” called someone from the next bed over. Their voice was high and wispy, somewhere between male, female, and fuck-it-all. When they spoke their words were interspersed with a guttural hiss that reminded Mick of radio static. “What malfunction did you get kk-kk?”

“Dunno. I don’t even remember coming here.” He wouldn’t have come here. Hospitals were…he was pretty done with hospitals.

“Do you remember your name?” asked the nurse, crouching next to his cot.

“Yep.”

“And the year?”

“Yep, that too.”

The nurse stared at him, and Mick held the gaze, and they had a brief competition of who could care the least before the nurse gave up and scanned Mick’s hospital bracelet instead. There was a brief cheery blip from the tablet as it leafed through the hospital’s database.

“Mr. Michael Rory,” the nurse announced. “Age 44, male. Came in presenting signs of hypothermia, body temperature at 29 C, administered blah blah blah--oh, shit. You’re that guy.”

Mick laughed, though the effort made his lungs ache. “I hear that more often than I’d like.”

“Geeze.” The nurse tapped the screen a few times, eyes wide. “So according to your records, you actually managed to get out of your bed once you were brought in, when all logic says you should have been halfway to a coma, and decided that you were so cold that you needed to warm up by setting the room on _fire_. Took two guys to wrestle the lighter out of your hand.”

“Huh.” Mick blinked, finding no specific memory of the event but definitely understanding the urge. “Go me.” 

“Not go you! Not when we’re trying to give you 100% oxygen!” The man threw his arms up as the two out of three conscious bedridden patients laughed, one sounding like a scratched record and the other like his mom. “We had to sedate you to keep you down! At a 29 C body temperature! I could have used you as a beer cooler!”

“Well, I don’t feel like setting the world on fire right now.” A little bit, maybe. But no more than usual. Mick tugged at his restrains. “Mind untying me?”

“Okay, but you’re not getting your lighter back.” The nurse stuck the tablet on top of the unconscious patient’s chest and went to work undoing the restraints. Mick could feel chafing against his legs, indicating he’d had enough strength to try and resist them. “Seriously, you should be dead by now. Probably would have saved us a lot of trouble if you were.”

“A lot of people should be dead kk by now,” said the ambiguous voice. “I’m pretty sure kk I saw a guy turning into a kk werewolf when I came in.”

The nurse swore, yanking hard on the restraints and cutting off Mick’s circulation before the pressure released again. “Shark. Turned into a shark. We literally had a guy in here mutating into a goddamn Street Shark. And someone who dissolved into sand and reformed on the other side of the room. And someone who had your opposite problem and came in with a fever that should have melted his brain, we had to stuff him into a tub and send someone out to a gas station to clean them out of ice, and then he _melted the ice_.”

“It’s the apocalypse,” said the other patient, in an old woman’s rasping tone. “That Harrison Wells and his particle machine were messing in matters he shouldn’t have messed with and we’ve gotten judged about it.” She sounded surprisingly calm about the prospective. Possibly even smug.

“If it was the apocalypse we’d at least be treating brimstone burns and demon maulings. I know how to deal with a mauling. I do not know how to deal with a goddamn Street Shark.” The nurse pulled the final strap free and Mick threw the blankets off himself. “It’s been insane all night. We ran out of beds, because we didn’t know who to keep for observation and who to kick out. I think every hospital in the city had the same problem after the particle accelerator went up. God fucking help you if you had a normal person heart attack, sorry, no, we’ve gotta save the heart monitor for the man who won’t stop melting into the bed.”

It was impressive, Mick mused. The man should win a medal for least fucks to ever be given by a human being.

“The particle accelerator? That thing S.T.A.R. Labs built? Weren’t they having some big ceremony for it tonight?”

“Yep. They turned it on and the damn thing exploded, and then shit all over the city fucked up. Trees went down, power lines went up like Christmas trees, and all this…” The nurse threw a frustrated hand at his assembled charges. “All _this_ weird bullshit started happening. You know I’m not even getting hazard pay for this?”

Mick slung the blanket around his shoulders. “I’m feeling pretty all right now,” he said. Comparatively, anyway. It didn’t feel like ice was forming around every tiny sac in his lungs. “How about letting me leave?”

The nurse opened his mouth to offer a rote protest, and then sighed. “You know what, pyro? Be my guest. You pretend I gave you a shpiel about how it’s your damn fault if you die because you wandered off, I’ll let you free up a bed for someone who won’t burn the place down.”

Mick stood on wobbly legs, and finally got a look at his roommates. The ambiguous one had masses of brachiating, beautiful scars flowing down their face and over their hands like they been struck by lightning. When they looked at Mick he almost fancied he could see little bursts of light in their eyes, and their fingers occasionally twitched against the blankets covering their lap. The older woman beside them had rough, bumpy brown skin like bark and a crown of what looked like sticks growing from the edges of her scalp to form a wreath with tiny leaves at the very tips of the twigs. Mick wasn’t sure she was actually breathing, but she was definitely awake and grinning at him. The woman lying unconscious in the third bed looked mostly normal, save for a bandaged gash across her forehead, but there was a soft glow coming from where her hands would be under the blanket.

“That, uh.” He stared, then pulled the thick blanket tighter around himself. “Yeah, okay.”

“Kkk,” said the one with lightning scars, and gave him a jittery thumbs up. “M’Alex. Congrats kk on not setting the hospital on fire.”

“Imani. You take care now,” said the tree woman, with the sort of smile one gave to one’s grandchildren. “And go get yourself some ginger tea on your way home, that always helps me warm up a little when I get the chills.”

“Thanks. Good luck with, uh.” He waved his hand at the staticky one’s general body. “With the things you got going on.”

“Kk appreciated.”

Three or four questions and rerouting to the next point of contact got Mick to the lost and found, where he used his thumbprint to prove ownership of his phone and his face to claim his wallet. Len wasn’t picking up. Busy, he guessed. All the crazy happening. Too busy to focus on just one guy. On the way out to the lobby he passed someone wheeling out a gurney with a form covered by a sheet and tried not to think about exactly where the limbs on the form connected to the rest of the body.

One of Mayor Snart’s least unpopular bills that year would be the official day of recognition for Central City’s emergency and medical personnel, set on the day after the anniversary of the accelerator explosion, because you had to commend the devotion to duty in the face of absolute, maddening weirdness. It was traditionally celebrated with a parade, a short ceremony, and drinking. Lots and lots of drinking.


	3. Half-Baked and Basted

“Romantic evening?” asked the clerk, as Mick dropped his overladen shopping basket on the counter.

“Power outage.”

Aside from drinking a kefir smoothie in yoga pants, there weren’t many things less traditionally masculine than a candle-lit bath, but Mick had officially stopped giving a damn.

The bathtub in his tiny apartment was meant more for containing shower water and washing two year old children than fitting a grown man. Mick slipped in and curled his legs up to his chest to submerge as much of himself as possible. For good measure, he turned on the shower to hit the parts of him that couldn’t get under the water. The water felt so hot that it burned his fingers and feet when he first slipped in, and he relished the pain as a welcome diversion from the ice. 

Mick watched the candles flickering around him, staring into each individual flame and wishing he could slip inside them to stay warm forever. The mirror over his cracked sink showed the way that the water slid down into the rivulets left by thick scar tissue across his arms and down his chest, drifting lazily down his knees, pooling occasionally at the hollows of his shoulders when he shifted and sat up to reposition himself.

Six months ago, Mick’s squad got dispatched to a two-story brownstone where the heavy snows melded steam with smoke, and Mick had gotten a little too close and personal with his one true love. Mick knew how to handle fire, how to let it get close enough to heat but not sear, but the flames had cooked half his body by the time they pulled him free. At the hospital, they’d called him brave, talked vigorously about the successes of reconstructive surgery without bothering to ask him if he _wanted_ further mangling of his flesh, given him long lists of “self-care” instructions, and had a psychotherapist come around to his room to help him work through trauma that he quite frankly refused to believe he had. And they’d put a lot of tubes in him in places that tubes _really_ shouldn’t have gone. 

Once they’d dialed the drugs down enough to let him halfway think straight, he’d wheedled back access to his phone and started making escape plans. Between the pain meds, the pain lingering beneath their haze, and his general frustration, his mind had fixated on the one person he thought he could trust and Mick called for a pickup from a number he hadn’t dialed in years. 

Len showed up with spare clothes, a Big Belly Value Meal, and no questions asked. If they’d talked on the way home Mick had been too strung out to remember it, and he’d barely gotten his pants on in the half hour it took for Len to take him back to his house.

After that, Mick hadn’t talked to much of anyone.

He’d stood in front of his dirty mirror and looked himself over as he changed his bandages, admiring the way the pus-filled wounds began to change over the course of weeks into gorgeous scars that showed where fire had licked him clean and left its indelible mark on him. He’d considered dowsing his face in brief flames to burn scars into his cheeks, scorch the tips of his ears and chin, bring the ridges of scars up past where shirts necks and sleeves could hide how beautiful he’d become. People, nervous and scared and dirty, had seemed even more imperfect without the beautiful marks he’d kept on his skin. 

Mick acknowledged his head had been in a weird place back then, even if setting the house on fire seemed like a really nice idea right now.

The chill slip back into Mick’s skin as the water faded to room temperature. He put his clothes back on and sat huddled on the bathroom floor under every blanket and towel he owned, a bottle of Captain Morgan’s between his knees and the space heater blowing at full blast.

Shit. Len could at least have texted.

The fire chief had given him plenty of time to recover, because technically he’d saved some idiot grampa’s life while he was busy getting his makeover, and Mick had spent a good bit of it drunk. The one major time he’d left the house he went to the usual bar, picked up the usual kind of man, reveled in how they’d stared when he took his shirt off. Len had crossed his mind when he felt how cold the man’s fingers were (Len’s hands were always cold), and left the bar before the guy’s hands could wander past second base. 

Thinking about Len made him ache, and Len’s hands made the lonely cold even worse. He should have just dragged Len out of that place by his overexpensive tie, Mick mused. At least then he’d be freezing to death in his own house when the explosion hit, and he’d have Len instead of a hospital. Mick got his phone out and told it to call “Len”, then put to speaker so he could continue huddling up under his blanket while he prepped his expletive-ridden voice mail message.

Three rings, and then a voice far too high for Len’s smooth tones cut through. “Mick? Mick, it’s Lisa. Where the hell are you?”

“At my apartment, Miss Mayor, where the hell else would I be?”

Lisa’s voice grew frantic. “Len says you ditched him after the particle accelerator malfunctioned. Where the hell did you go?”

“ _I_ ditched? I'm the one who woke up at a hospital!”

“Which hospital?”

“I was at Lady of Somethin’.”

“So is Len.”

“…’is’ I don’t like ‘is’.”

In Mick’s mind’s eye he saw Lisa toss her head back in disgust. “They brought him in with a high fever. You two must have gotten separated in the shuffle. He’s doing better now, they’ll let him walk out tomorrow. There don’t even appear to be any lingering side effects, which the doctors say is basically impossible with how hot he was running.”

“Melted an ice bath?”

“Yeah. How’d you know?”

Mick laughed, making his own lungs ached. “I froze, he burned. Should have been the other way around, really. Apparently the whole city got weird last night.”

“Weird’s putting it mildly.” Mental Lisa put a frustrated hand put to a forehead. When was the last time he’d seen her do that? …when was the last time he’d seen her outside of a campaign commercial? “I haven’t slept. I don’t even know what’s happening, or why it’s happening, or what the hell I’m supposed to do about it. I’m really considering asking Bellows if he wants his job back.”

“Being mayor sounds like it sucks.”

“Two days ago, I’d say I was handling it pretty okay. Now having a sex scandal and skipping town with the state budget sounds pretty appealing. Fuck.”

“Well, I could help you with at least one of those things.”

And they laughed, and it was nice because the world was shit and it had been too long since they could make crime jokes together.

“Tell Len I’m sorry I didn’t spring him on the way out, yeah?”

“Oh no, he’s loving this. My sympathy looks way less fake if my own brother’s one of the casualties of the attack, and he hates to lose an opportunity to give someone an ‘exclusive’ interview. Whoever you give it to owes you a favor, and whoever didn’t get it learns their place next time.”

“Your brother’s a stone-cold bastard.”

“Isn’t he just. Look, I have to go—let’s have some drinks when this settles down, okay?”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“Maybe in a couple days? A week? Pretty soon” She sounded unpleasantly desperate. “Once he’s out?”

“Yeah,” said Mick, not buying it any more than Lisa was. “Sure.”

By the end of the week, no one had called and Mick finally manned up enough to go back to work. There was no shortage of fires to put out in the wake of the explosion, or unusual situations requiring cranes and burly people to rescue one from, and it kept Mick from stewing in uncomfortable emotions that lay somewhere between loathing and self-loathing.

The cold eventually faded, save for the occasional chill that shot through him at unexpected intervals, but the abrupt fixation on Leonard Snart hadn’t. Len’s hands, Len’s lips, Len’s eyes, Len in a fancy suit looking like he owned the place, Len as a stringy teenager staring up at him from the concrete floor in juvie with blood on his lips, Len warm (warm!) and soft and sharp and hard. He had unsettling dreams of pressing into Len’s chest and through to his ribcage to curl up next to the soothing throb of his heart, all the more disturbing for how little he was horrified by it.

Mick didn’t date, exactly. Never had, and not because of any unresolved attachment issues that he was sure the hospital therapist would accuse him of having. No, the problem was certain societal assumptions that if you wanted a hand on your shoulder you wanted it on your dick, and if you didn’t find the latter idea interesting you had something wrong with you. And depending on who was wanting to get their hand on your dick, they’d question you were either closeted-gay or sneakily straight as well. It was a pain in the ass and in general not worth the effort at all.

That commentary on the state of modern sexual politics had been part of a long chain of rants against humanity that Mick had dropped on Len one day during a drunken bender outside the Flower Shop. 

And Len had actually fucking _gotten it_. The first guy to ever get it, and maybe to agree. Len himself was a cold enough guy in public, moving with a shark’s grace. If he touched your arm it was a veiled threat to let you know that he could break it as easily as he laid fingers on it. He’d been the only guy Mick had ever met who knew where to put his hands and where to leave well enough alone.

Finally. _Finally_ , after a month of waiting and watching the news struggle to make of the post-particle-accelerator world, Len called.

“Hey, Mick.”

Mick gave him a grunt and went back to folding laundry, phone tucked under his chin.

“I just wanted to see how you were doing. To see if you’d lit yourself on fire again lately and I needed to send you a new fire extinguisher.”

“Nope. Just everyone else setting everything else on fire.”

“Great. So.” There was a long pause from both men. Mouthy guy in front of the cameras, now Len was at a loss for words. Sure, Len, whatever. Mick strongly contemplated hanging up.

“Meet me at Pritchard Park next week,” Len finally blurted out. “About seven pm, near the waterfront. It’s south of the Arial Street Beach. I’ll text you the coordinates. June 18.” Request, order, or plea, Mick couldn’t quite interpret the tone.

“Uh. Kay. You want a nice relaxing walk on the beach?” Mick asked, rolling his eyes.

“Not exactly.”


	4. Park District Pyromania

It was not a relaxing walk on the beach, Mick decided upon arrival. Mick was very certain of the many things it was not. He was still trying to get his head around what it _was_. 

“Is it legal for the Mayor’s campaign manager to be around this much patchouli?”

“Mmm. I’ve got plausible deniability.”

“I feel like I just walked into a cult meeting. What the hell did you bring me to?”

The sound of pounding drums filled Mick’s ears as they walked past a cluster of thrift-store-garbed people with swirling tattoos of flowers and personally meaningful book quotes. A shirtless child ran past, giggling as its owner swooped down to snatch it up and drag it back to its enclosure. A woman dressed far too young for what society told her what her age was had scaled a nearby tree to hang a hammock from its branches.

“They call it the Full Moon Flame Circle. Started up a few years ago, one of those things put on by the hipster crowd. The Park District just officially endorsed it.” Len gestured up towards the darkening sky, where the aforementioned full moon was putting in an early appearance. He had a blanket slung over one shoulder and a sixpack of sodas dangling from one arm. (Sodas, Len. Seriously?) Despite the near-evening chill he was wearing a sleeveless shirt and tasteful leather sandals, where Mick had a hoodie and boots. “You’ll see the appeal once the sun goes down.”

Mick grunted his noncommitance. Fine, Lenny, fine. “So, how’s being the power behind the throne going?”

“I’m Mayor Snart’s campaign and PR manager, not her puppeteer. Lisa’s the ship that’s carrying Central City’s hopes, dreams, and complaints. I’m just the little icebreaker that goes in front and clears a path to make sure she doesn’t have any trouble getting to her destination.”

“Did you just compare your sister to the Titanic?”

The crowd of hipsters and hipster hanger-ons had assembled themselves around a roped-off circle delineated by wooden posts and strings of plastic. Len dropped the blanket into a clear space of grass, next to an older couple who had set up a low table and were working their way through grapes and cheese. “The Titanic was a perfectly competent ship that happened to run into a few unexpected problems augmented by human idiocy. I’m saying if the Titanic had a campaign manager it might not have sunk.”

The drumming intensified. Women with their hair tied back with kerchiefs and men in pleasantly tight pants were starting to gather at one end of the circle. Some of them were idly spinning orbs on the ends of strings as the sun finally tipped below the horizon, and one person was going through squirting sticks and pronged hula hoops with a water bottle.

A man in a worn heavy metal t-shirt walked into the middle of the circle and raised his arms, shouting for attention. The drumming slowed and ebbed.

“Oh hey, the cult leader’s gonna preach,” Mick said.

The cult leader welcomed the hipster crowd to the aforementioned Full Moon Flame Circle, and was met with heavy drumming and whistles. He started going through rules—no running into the circle, no alcohol, no illegal drugs (yeah, Mick could smell how well that rule was working out), no garbage, don’t be a dick, be gone by eleven before the cops rounded you up.

“So what are they doing out here? Community theatre?”

“Just watch.”

“If anyone starts singing, I’m gone.”

A short woman with cropped hair stepped up and held up her dangling orbs on a string to a butch chick standing guard at the beginning of the circle. There was the tiny flash of a lighter in the dark, and then the balls burst into flame. Mick could see where the flare illuminated a bright grin on the tiny woman’s face. She walked across the circle to one end and began to swing the orbs around her, spinning them like bolos around her wrists and head.

Oh. So that was where the ‘flame’ part of it came in.

The next dancer came out into the circle with a pair of fans-like devices, each prong tipped with flame, and a third was swinging a burning hula hoop around her hips as she walked. People with fire extinguishers sat at their feet as they danced, the crowd whooping as flaming sticks were juggled or hoops were swung around bare throats.

As the flames began to die on each dancer another person would step into replace them, rotating them out again and again until Mick’s eyes hurt from staring at the light. The heavy drumming made the world seem dreamlike and time stretch out. There was flame when it was tiny and barely alive, and flame when it was a roaring gorgeous chaotic housefire, but this was…this was fire as art. Fire twisted around living bodies. One man came out with a pair of flaming whips, setting the grass briefly alight with each flick of his wrist, and the loud crack and flare made Mick gasp as if in arousal.

“They do this every month, in the summer,” Len told him over the sounds of the still-pounding drums as the whips cracked again. “There’s some kind of firespinning subculture and they want to show it off. Just for the hell of it.”

There were staffs like double-headed candelabras, sticks juggled before being balanced on noses, and rods that moved in long orbits on invisible strings that made it seem as if they were levitating. Len’s’ hand was finally touching his, and for once in the last month he wasn’t actively fixated on Len. Mick's jaw hung slack as flames on both ends of a long pole illuminated the ankle tattoos of the upside down man carefully rolling it up and down the length of his legs.

“It’s…gorgeous, Len.”

“I thought it’d be your thing.”

Mick had always loved fire. Fire was pure and wholesome, cleaned out all the grime of organic life and just left more fire behind. It kept you warm when the landlord turned the heat off, purged memories when you burned the possessions of unpleasant people your mom had finally managed to force out of the house. Even as a child he’d light fires in the vacant lot near his house and feed it with different things to see how it changed the flare and the smoke. 

Fire made your problems go away…except for the problem of cops, which was why he’d wound up in juvie. He might have continued through it up to jail, too, except juvie was where he’d met Leonard Snart, locked up as a fourteen-year-old accomplice to his asshole dad’s thefts. The juvie boys mistook a mouthy attitude and a lack of muscle for an easy target, and they’d jumped Len with three sets of fists and a shiv. Mick had never had much moral fiber, but he had a low tolerance for punks, and in a fit of pique jumped them right back. Len had stuck to him like glue ever since.

They’d made it out the other side barely before eighteen. Mick had no job, no real ambitions, and no real fucks to give about whether he stayed out or when back in.

But Len, Len had been driven. Len looked at a world that thought he was worthless and decided to devote his life to telling that world “Fuck You”. He’d gone back to high school and then gone to college, which Mick had never entirely forgiven him for. He’d even gone to _Europe_ for a few years. Fucking France and Germany. He’d gotten his juvie records sealed and talked Mick into doing the same, when Mick had no idea that was even an option, just to make sure no one could wave that shit in their faces. Mick had never seen a man become so socially respectable with an engine motivated by pure spite.

It was Len who’d finally pulled him down from floating from shitty job to shitty job, too.

When you set your own fire, Len had said, they called you a pyromaniac. When you burst into a fire someone else had set with your ax waving, they called you a hero and gave you a paycheck. Go put on the red suspenders and you can make a proper career out of being in blazes, he’d said, if you can resist setting your own to help stir up business. 

Mick had given his apathetic nod, and the next thing he knew Lisa was writing his applications for him. 

“Say this for you, Len, “Mick said as the final set of flames went out, leaving Mick with a sensation of aching loss. “You know how to show a guy a good night out.” He began to stand up. Len pulled him back down and then Mick was heavily aware of the sensation of skin against skin.

“Mmm, just wait one moment longer.”

“Eh?”

A trio of pleasantly burly men walked out into the darkened circle. No whips and no wheels, just water bottles. Each took a swig, then a deep inhale—

And then like dragons spewed out three massive gouts of flame.

“They keep the firebreathers for the finale,” Len said with his lips near Mick’s ear, and it might have counted double as a kiss if Mick hadn’t already been leaning back against him. The men alternated between sips of accelerant and spitting through lighters to bring up bright flares against the cool night air and mosquitos, ending the act by leaning in close to each other (like Len, who was all but resting his chin on Mick’s shoulder) and letting out a single fireball at triple size.

When that faded, Mick found himself cheering like a child at a magic show.

Okay. Five minutes. Maybe an hour. For an hour, he’d forgive Len for leaving him behind.

***

“That was fucking amazing, Len,” Mick said as he tumbled into the passenger seat with a massive grin on his face.

Len settled against the wheel with a smugness that made Mick’s heart even lighter. “What should we do now?”

“You’re asking me?”

“I picked the date, you pick the afterparty.”

“How about we party right now? Get some drinks and—and fuck it, I don’t think I’m getting any more lit than I am now. Let’s go party so hard we make another particle accelerator explode.”

Len smiled, that sharp-edged grin that always drove Mick a little wild, and started up the car. “I think we can show a little restraint this time.”

Unbidden, his hand crossed the barrier of the gearshift to meet Mick’s callused palm. Soft hands, but Mick knew where all the scars were hidden, where a tiny burn or nick had made Len just a little sharper, same as he knew exactly how to kiss those lips and tumble with him into the backseat of the sedan. 

He was warm, adoringly wonderfully warm. Mick had always found Len’s hands to be oddly cool (“circulation issues”) before but who cared, for once something finally felt warm. So warm Mick could let himself be enveloped in them, pulled into that warmth, pulled in past skin and muscle and bone into--

Mick looked up, to where he was pinning Len’s hand to the car, A moment ago his thick and scarred fingers were overlapping with Len’s. Now there were no fingers at all.

Where Len met Mick their hands were merging into something that swirled and flowed like molten rock. It was blue shot through with orange flecks and it was as beautiful as the fire. Both stared for a long, long moment before Len’s free arm shot up to elbow Mick in the throat.

Their hands parted with a loud gurgle and each clutched their limb to their chest, frantically making sure all the fingers were still there.

“Fuck!” Mick banged his head against the car window as he scrambled for the door latch. Fuck. Fuck. What the fuck was that.

Len was staring at him with that perfect poise and calm tainted by horror.

“What the hell was—“

“The fuck were you—“ 

Mick slammed his hand hard on the door latch and tumbled out of the car, dirt getting on his jacket as he shuffled to his feet and took off running. Behind him he heard the car engine roar and looked over his shoulder to see Len peel off in the opposite direction.

What the fuck. What the hell had Len tried to do to him?

Fear was the right response, he thought, as he finally slowed to a walk. Fear and disgust. Not that residual longing that said he should have simply given in to that perfect warmth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The fire spinning event in this chapter is based heavily on one that occurs regularly in Chicago. [Here's a few shots from it](http://www.fullmoonjam.org/photography-video/photo-gallery-2014/), if you're curious, though it does not capture the incessant drumming and the occasional smell of psychotropics on the evening breeze.


	5. The Codeword is Swordfish

They were called metahumans, said the news, and they reassured their audience that it should be very concerned about them. The city had become infested by people who could drop the temperature around them to arctic frigidity (Mick spent a lot of time staring into his lighter after Killer Frost popped up), or create earthquakes, or generate nuclear reactions in the palms of their hands. 

There was this one very fast guy in a dorky helmet with an awkward habit of saving people’s lives, the news reluctantly admitted. But you should probably be concerned about him too. 

(Later there’d be other metahumans stepping up to take on the mantle of ‘hero’, when Zoom was done having his way with Central City and making every meta who didn’t want to be blackmailed into crime hide under their bed. There’s be Weather Warlock, the Maestro, Blink, and Mirror Monarch, not to mention people like Prankster who lacked powers but just wanted a piece of the action. But at the moment the Flash was the only role model around, and in Mick’s opinion he had the kind of chin you just really wanted to punch.) 

The news gave them titles, too, and eventually the metacriminals started taking them on preemptively. Mick came out of the fire station locker room to find the boys (and Emily) huddled around the TV watching the arrests of “Catalyst” and “Feral”.

“Is that a goddamn werewolf?” Mick asked, sticking his head over Hikaru’s shoulder.

“Might as well be,” said the other fire fighter. “And the chick blows stuff up with her brain. They just tried to take out a Fourth Second Bank.”

“We live in some messed up times, guys,” said Masood from the other end of the couch.

The news cut to Mayor Snart making a noncommittal statement with the sort of weasely reassurance words that mayors made in such circumstances and a gratuitous thank you to the self-titled Flash for saving the city from the threat of villainy. Mick wondered if she knew anything. If she’d seen Len’s hand distort and flow into her own. If she was covering this up for the sake of her career, or merely had suspicions she didn’t want to listen to about the man who’d half-raised her. If she was unwitting prey or fully aware her brother had turned into some bizarre monster that fed by luring in his victims with tempting warmth and then dissolving their—

The camera panned over Len’s impassive face in the crowd and Mick dug into his pocket for his phone.

Whatever Len was now, the Len he’d been before would kill Mick if he left her in danger.

***

“I need to meet with you. There’s something we’ve gotta talk about.”

“Why not talk now?” Lisa sounded wary, and Mick again wondered how much she knew. It was hard to tell over the phone, and for all he knew she’d just wrapped up an unpleasant business meeting and was annoyed that Mick was holding her back from getting back to that sex scandal she’d been threatening to create.

“I’d really rather meet you in person. Somewhere private, okay?

“You know this is how spy movies start, right? I’ll get there and you’ll be dead and I’ll spend the next two hours of the film trying to find out what you couldn’t tell me over the phone in thirty seconds because you were being paranoid.”

“I don’t think the communists are coming after me, Lisa. I just want you to be looking me in the face when I say it.” 

“Uh…huh.” Why did she sound like she didn’t trust him? If anyone was going to trust him, it was Lisa or Len, because the rest of the list wasn’t that long. “How about the little courtyard behind the Aon Center, tomorrow around seven am? It’s pretty secluded and nobody’s there early in the morning, but we won’t be in some dark alley waiting to get sniped by the KGB.”

“Sure, I can do that.”

"I'll be wearing a green fedora and the codeword is swordfish.”

“The codeword’s ‘Bite me, little girl’.” And they both laughed, in that way where no one was actually amused but they needed to prove to themselves how little they were worried, and then Lisa hung up.

Always the organizer, Lisa was. Len knew how to plan a heist but Lisa knew how to get all the pieces moved into place and under control.

(It would be nice if somebody could get things under control right now.)

***

Mick had walked by Aon Center dozens of times and never known about the miniature park carefully cradled between the expensive office buildings. It was sunk into the ground, just low enough to not be noticeable at street level. Water cascaded down a series of fake rocks and imitation mosses, with hanging plants meant to imitate raw natural beauty that hadn’t existed in this region for several hundred years. Outside the subterranean café was a set of small tables and chairs under an elegant pagoda for lattes to be sipped at, with phone charging stations cleverly concealed by carvings of boggle-eyed Chinese dragons. There were a lot of unexpected perks about being a high-powered businessperson, apparently.

Lisa showed up a few minutes late, which did not seem mayor-ly to Mick.

“How’s Len?” he asked as she slid in next to him. Makeup perfect, earrings tasteful, hair probably done by someone famous and French to comply with the extensive code of physical appearance that applied only to those identified as female. Lisa had always been glamourous, mind. She just had more money to be glamorous with now.

The first time Mick met Lisa she was still working her way through her baby teeth. Lewis Snart had been in a ‘bit of a mood’ and Mick let Len bring his kid sister around to do her homework without getting a beer bottle thrown at her head. She’d been born while Mick was still watching Len’s back in juvie, and Len had given Snart Sr. a few years to try and raise her right. By the time she was nine he’d snatched her away and started paying his father off to show up at PTA meetings and pretend he gave a shit while Lisa shuffled between Len’s tiny apartment and Mick’s mother’s place.

Cute kid, Mick had thought. Blonde, though. He always had to feel sorry for blondes. In retrospect, the way Lisa played so elegantly on the needs of a mother who had always secretly harbored the desire for a daughter, or at least a son who shaved properly, had openly foreshadowed her career in politics.

Lisa’s assignment had been one of those ‘what do you want to be when you grow up’ essays. Lisa had chewed her pencil and said that what she really wanted was to be in charge of everyone, so she’d marry the President of the United States. According to her father, women only were worth as much as the men they were attached to, so she’d marry as far up as she could go.

Mick didn’t see the issue with it, and it was only homework so who gave a shit, but Len nearly flipped a table. He put Lisa in his lap in front of an abridged encyclopedia and walked her through the suffragette movement, Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir, and the reign of Queen Victoria. Mick had slowly lowered his bodybuilder magazine to watch the light break across Lisa’s face.

You could get out of here, Len was telling her. You’re strong, you’re smart, you can do it. There was a tenderness in his voice that Mick had never seen on the tough kid in juvie, but also the kind of fire that would burn down an entire city block. 

Len went out of his way to make sure Lisa’s college fund was respectable, pure-as-snow-and-not-the-cocaine-kind money, though his own education was funded by a series of carefully planned heists with the companies he and Mick had gotten janitor positions with. Mick spent his loot on luxuries and booze, Len saved and plotted and used every theft as a foothold to yank himself and Lisa up to the next opportunity.

Lisa had majored in PoliSci and ignored the boys trying to help her get her MRS degree instead. She’d started her career with phone banks, then door-to-door solicitation, then a job as a political aide. The first time she ran for office against a disgraced alderman with Len as her campaign manager she was as good as gone from the life she'd once led with Mick.

It was the biggest heist the siblings had ever planned, for the biggest con the Snart criminal dynasty had ever pulled: convincing the world that Leonard and Lisa Snart were respectable citizens.

Which still did not excuse dropping Mick like a sack of potatoes to go play politics.

“Len’s fine,” said Lisa in a strained tone. “Busy, but everyone is right now. Weird stuff going on, budget deals, that sort of bullshit.”

“Yeah. Weird stuff.” Mick looked at the waterfall and tried to find something soothing in the noise of the water. Imaging waterfall sounds had been on that big ‘self-care’ packet they’d tried to send him home with before Len boosted him out of the hospital, thinking of comforting physical sensations when you found yourself overstressed. Drinking had seemed more efficient than going down a list of relaxing sight-taste-touch-smell-sound items every time you got worked up about something, especially when the list went fire-whiskey-fire-fire-fire. He ran a hand over his face, up over his buzzed-short hair and the scarred patches where hair would never grow again. 

“So yeah, weird stuff. Just gonna jump in right here on that.”

“Jump away.”

Brace for yelling, brace for getting slapped, okay, let’s go. “Lisa, I think Len’s a metahuman. I haven’t told anyone else, but you’re his sister. You ought to know.”

Lisa didn’t flinch. He’d expected some kind of surprise or rebuttal, but she was stiff as a board. “Really.” He’d never heard a voice so carefully neutral. “And what makes you say that?”

Mick looked at his fist, opening and closing it. “The last time I saw him, we were…our hands touched and I felt this…this pull. This warm feeling that I didn’t want to resist, like I should just let myself…fall apart and go to him. Be part of him.” This sounded disturbingly romantic. Mick flexed his hand and ran his fingers down his knuckles again, feeling the urge to count them again and make sure Len hadn’t kept any. After the melting, an hour had gone by before it had properly felt like his limb again. “And I looked up and our arms were starting to melt together. Or turn into mist. Or smoke, or goo, something like that. Look, I’m not even blaming him for this, I’m not sure he was even controlling it. But if he’s got this, he’s dangerous. To himself, to other folks…to you.”

Because he liked Lisa. Not the same way he liked Len (definitely not how he liked Len), but she was a smart woman and she was good to him, and wasn’t creeped out by some gnarly scruffy guy hanging out with her beautiful professional political mastermind brother, which was more than some people would be able to pull off.

“That’s…that’s really interesting, Mick.” Lisa stared blankly at the edge of the waterfall pool and the sculptures of young boys clad only in small leaves riding on thick arching fish in a way that upon reflection might have said some weird things about the artist.

“I’m not making this up, Lisa.”

“Did you see him do it to anyone else?” She wouldn’t look at him.

“No. I haven’t seen him since then. Maybe he hasn’t, maybe he has. I don’t even know what it is he did.”

“Has anyone else tried to melt your arm off?”

“Lisa, I’m not crazy, I _saw_ \--“

“ _I know what you goddamn saw._ ”

Maybe Lisa was a metahuman too. No one should have gotten a shout that forceful through such tightly gritted jaws. The falling water swallowed the yell, hiding it from the early morning commuters and cleaning staff inside the building. Lisa closed her eyes, slowly, and then opened them again.

“Len told me what happened that night too. He said the exact same thing. You touched hands, there was that pull. But he said it wasn’t warmth, it was cold. He’s been feeling like he’s running a fever all the time ever since the accelerator explosion and touching you was like a cool wind sweeping all that away, and he just wanted to fall apart into you. But that wasn’t him doing it himself. Mick, he said that _you_ were the metahuman.”

Mick blinked a few times. “Uh. What.”

Lisa chewed on her lip. Red lipstick attached itself to her teeth, making her look like she’d been tearing someone’s throat out. “I don’t think he’s lying. I don’t think you’re lying, either. But I think you need to stop avoiding each other so we can figure out what’s going on.”

“If I was a metahuman I think I’d know by now.”

“They say some people’s abilities don’t manifest except in very specific circumstances. Maybe yours only react to very specific people.”

She held out her hand. Lisa’s hands were sleek, and her nails were perfect, likely buffed clean and hard by the most expert of political manicurists. “I did this with Len. Nothing happened. Try doing the same thing with me.”

Mick looked at her, deep into those eyes that any person who fancied her type would be lucky to have on him, as long as they watched their ass. He had no idea how an ugly asshole like Snart Sr. had made such pretty kids. His hand hovered over Lisa’s palm.

There was no pull, this time. No desire to wrap himself in her heat. Mick lowered his hand to press against hers, then let his fingers curl to envelop it. Both of them watched their hands intently, waiting for something drastic to happen.

Finally, Mick laughed. “Mayor Snart caught in illicit hand-holding affair with disfigured white trash,” he said.

“My physical contact with Mr. Rory was related entirely to a professional inquiry, and I find it disgraceful that the media is choosing to shame a man who has saved countless lives for injuries sustained in the line of duty,” she instantly rebutted, popping the kind of smile she never showed on television. Sharp, like Len’s, but an honest sharpness. Flirty, like she’d been before the press started caring about what her face looked like. So perfectly like the girl he used to put on the back of his motorcycle and drive to ice skating practice.

Mick let his hand drop away. “Now what?”

“Now you and Len finally stop avoiding each other and have a goddamn conversation. He thinks I can’t tell when he’s pining about something but I’ve seen enough of lovestruck Leonard Snart to know when he’s trying to hide a crush on someone.”

“Seriously, Lisa?” Mick leaned away from her with a frown. “Len does not have a crush on me. Nobody has crushes in their forties, and if they did Len wouldn’t have them.” 

“Len damn well does. And he’s guilty about falling out of touch with you and making it look like he started being too good for you, and so am I to be honest.” She sighed, and looked up past the waterfall to where the first jogger of the morning was starting to do laps around the block in her tiny, overexpensive gym shorts. “We were a team, y’know? You, me, him, and the world could fucking deal with it. But he gets obsessed when he’s on a mission, and that mission was getting us moving up in the world.”

“It ain’t like he did all the heavy lifting on that, Madame Mayor.”

“Yeah, I’m not saying he won the election for me. Just that he lost a little focus along the way. He wanted power over the folks that always stepped on us. And he got it.” She gazed sideways at him, then ran her fingers across her leather briefcase cover. “I know how addicting that power can be. Once we figure out this whole you-two-melting situation, we need to get you back on the team.”

“I’m a working class stiff, what the hell good am I to you guys?”

“You’re Mick Rory, that’s what.” She leaned over to put a light kiss on his temple, then draw him up with a firm hand on his wrist. “It wouldn’t be a heist without you.”


	6. Getting the Gang Back Together

“Are mayors allowed to break into secure research facilities?”

“No more than anyone else,” said Lisa, wrist-deep in a fusebox. “Can’t believe these nerds—all those fancy sensors and heat-sensing cameras up on the top floor, but they don’t think to put anything around the area that lets you turn them all off. You think they’d know better given what kind of research and tech is in here.”

“In 2014, an 85 year old nun and two middle-aged hippies broke into the most tightly secured nuclear research and processing laboratory in the country, armed with nothing but a pair of wirecutters. They made it all the way to the highly enriched uranium facility and had a couple of leisurely hours to paint up some anti-nuke messages and splash human blood around before one of the guards finally got around to showing up.” 

Len’s silky voice in his earpiece stirred up unwanted urges in Mick, but also made him fear for the safety of America. “Banks and jewelry displays are more frequent targets,” Len continued. “Their security is lower, but they’re more paranoid because more people are trying to get in. Science labs don’t usually get that kind of attention, so they don’t expect to get hit.”

“So if they’d had a bomb instead of some spray paint…”

“There’d probably be a lot more of eastern Tennessee below sea level.” God, Mick had missed that laugh. That hint of sadism and black humor that disregarded what would cause most people to gasp in feigned horror (because as if they cared about eastern Tennessee either).

“Well, wirecutters we’ve got,” said Mick. "Unfortunately we brought the opposite of a nun, and the blood’s gonna be staying right where it is if you don’t mind.”

“Hey, leave Lisa alone.”

The lights cut out. “You act like that’s an insult,” said Lisa as she pulled her arm free and snapped on her flashlight. Her thin gloves were speckled with grease flecks. 

Yeah, that was the Lisa he remembered. Pretty, but in a sharp way—not a Valley Girl but a Bond Girl, without the requisite reformation/death-via-Bond’s-dick that came with it. Hair always on point even when it had been under a balaclava for an hour, lipstick razor sharp even when no one else would see it, her fingers light and careful. He hadn’t seen that Lisa in years.

“Okay, we’re heading up to 213A. Len, wait about two minutes and then come in after us. Stay by the door, Mick will be on the far side of the room.”

“You got it.”

There were scientists and then there were _nerd_ scientists. Room 213A had a table covered in a sprawling tangle of wires and circuitboards, next to a console featuring one lonely computer outganged by action figures. A shelf under the desk had several rows of DVDs—Mick’s eyes caught the first four seasons of _Firefly_ , David Croenenburg’s _Frankenstein_ , and a box labeled in black marker as “Del Toro Presents: Tomes of Lovecraft (Vol. 1)”. 

“One of the scientists here is seriously into geeky stuff,” said Lisa, who’d noted where his gaze had gone. “He’s a cute little guy, but a bit of a creeper. One of those guys who’d go on a power trip the moment you gave him a square inch of ground. I think he assumed I’d naturally be into him because he could explain particle physics in fourth grader terms to a woman with a master’s degree.”

“Hey, you’ve still got that sex scandal banked up.”

Lisa laughed. “And I’m not planning to waste it on Cisco Ramon.”

Mick followed Lisa to a thick metal chest in the corner with a touchpad on top. He leaned on the wall while she went to town on the lock.

He knew Len was almost there even before Lisa’s brother cruised in the door. Len wasn’t wearing the bright black that would stand out against the bare-white walls of STAR Labs but the shades of grey that would let you find a place to lurk in the shadows without attracting too much attention. The fingers of Len’s left hand were rubbing together, itching to find something to snatch up and put into his pockets like the twin magpie he was to his sister, and he stood with lax pose and shoulders back like his control over the situation wasn’t in a shred of doubt.

Len was handsome enough in a suit but in heist gear he looked goddamn _incredible_. Mick found himself gripping the edge of the table to keep from crossing the room and pressing him into the wall. (Pressing against him, into him, getting past those clothes and into Len to fill up his skin from the inside _no no what the fuck self_.) Having his first sight of Len in person being the Len that never failed to grab his attention was really not helping the situation.

Len was staring at him like he had the same thing on his mind, too. There was a ravenous hunger in his eyes that far outstretched his desire for whatever baubles could be picked up and slipped into his pockets. Their gaze didn’t break until Lisa stepped between them and snapped her fingers. “Hey, hey! Eyes on the prize, loverboys.”

Both men blinked and shook their heads, trying to throw off the dire need for touch. Lisa held up an item the size of a television remote, with two prongs on the end pointing off in separate directions. “This is a prototype developed by Star Labs about a month ago. It’s a sensor that detects the presence of the metahuman gene. At the moment it needs to be in close proximity to the carrier but they think they can modify it to detect metahumans from at least 100 yards away. Star Labs is planning to make them available to the public eventually, on Apple Watch or something, but they were showing it off to me a few weeks ago to see if I wanted them installed at the office.”

“Amazing things, those Apple Watches,” said Mick, staring at it. “So, that’ll tell us which one of us is the metahuman?”

“Maybe. I got a theory, we’ll see how good it is.”

Her first steps were towards Len. Slow and hesitant. Maybe the closest she’d been to her brother in a while. She held out the device at arm’s length and waved it in Len’s face, then gradually lowered it until she was touching his bare skin.

“Nothing,” she said, only barely showing the signs of releasing the breath she’d been holding. “No sign of an active metahuman gene.”

Len pushed her arm away. “Good. Now you can stop denting my cheek.”

Mick felt his stomach drop. If it wasn’t Len, that meant that he was the one. He was the freak, and Len was…he wouldn’t say victim, never about Len, but definitely not the offending party. Whatever had nearly happened, it was Mick’s fault. He found himself closing his eyes as Lisa came back over to him, wincing as the cold metal touched his skin.

Nobody in the room breathed until Lisa announced, “And none over here. You’re clean too.”

“A thing that no one has ever said about Mick Rory until this moment.”

Mick’s eyes flashed open. “Wait. If I’m not a metahuman, and he’s not a metahuman, what the hell’s going on here?”

“Well, that’d be where my theory comes in.” Lisa took his arm and dragged him across the room, posing him so he stood next to Len. They were still a foot apart but Mick fancied he could feel Len’s alluring heat radiating out from his skin. Lisa grabbed his hand and forced it against Len, not requiring force to keep either of them in position. God, he was warm. “Hold hands like awkward teenagers.”

Both men watched their hands very, very carefully as their fingers slowly intertwined. That was good. That was right. Mick could see the shimmer begin at the places where their skin touched and this time couldn’t find it in himself to pull away no matter how much the rest of his brain stayed in terror mode.

There was a loud, frantic beep and suddenly Lisa was wrenching their hands apart. “Okay, _stop_!” The twisting wisp of blue steam stretched between them until Lisa bodychecked Len into the floor and the connection snapped apart. Len sprawled on the floor with his fingers recoalescing onto his hand, breathing hard, and Mick found himself reaching out for Len until Lisa’s elbow hit his stomach.

“What the _fuck_ , you two.”

“Just felt…”

“Yeah…”

Wanted. Felt _right_. They stayed in place, watching each other, as Lisa went to recover the metahuman detector and get it back into its box. She was breathing hard, forcing down panic. 

“Yeah. Yeah, that’s what I thought. Whatever you’ve got, it only happens when the two of you are together. And just the two of you.”

“Why? How’s that even work?” said Mick, staring at his fingers and flexing them. Mick could feel the way hand was tingling, as if the hand wasn’t really his own and had just gotten attached to his wrist by some bizarre mistake.

No. His fingers. Not Len’s. His fingers attached to his wrist and no one else’s. His fingers.

“It was part of the lecture I got from Dr. Wells when they were showing off the device. They’ve found a connection between specific metahuman traits and the situation the person was in during the accelerator explosion. King Shark was doing aquatic animal researcher when the accelerator went off. A man about to be executed by lethal injection turned into liquid poison, a guy by the beach turned into sand. Where were you? Near each other?”

Mick laughed. “Uh, yeah. Near. Pretty near. Really near.”

“Oh my god, you two. You were at a fundraiser.”

“Well, we hadn’t gotten around to raising anything else.” Nothing like a good dirty joke to break an unsettling mood.

Len was looking down at his hands and touching one finger after the other to his thumb, up and down the line. He was counting them under his breath.

They left quietly, and the urge to steal at least one little souvenir was resisted by everyone but Lisa, who grabbed a tiny action figure of a scantily clothed Japanese girl with a sword. Mick picked up his own car, tucking in the earpiece to listen to Lisa’s directions on when and how to pull back onto the road.

He could hear a soft huff on the other end of the line. “Suppose that puts the kibosh on this whole family reunion via illicit activities idea,” said Len.

“What do you think would actually happen if you two didn’t break apart again?” said the more distant voice of Lisa.

“No idea, but I doubt it would end well for either of us.” Lying, Mick knew. Len had that same inner need that he did. It would end _right_.

God, what the fuck.

“But it only happens if you two touch, right? You can still be in the same room. Maybe you can even find a way to control it, eventually.”

“Sounds like more work than just never speaking ever again.” 

For the next few hairpin turns the other end of the line was silent. Finally, Len spoke, in a voice softer than either PR confidence or thief cockiness. “...Yeah. But sounds like less fun.”

“Stay for dinner, Mick?” Lisa asked, her sharp voice dulled by soft desperation. “We’ll figure this out. Just…don’t go just yet.”

Mick let the idea float, and found he had a hard time keeping his focus on the road. He could have just kept on driving, headed home, gotten back into the hot bath again to ward off the new bout of chill. Instead he took the next left and started following Lisa’s headlights again.

“Well. Can’t really argue with a free meal.”

Lisa’s house was surprisingly normal-looking. He’d expected a penthouse suite overlooking the city like an imperious queen on her throne, but Lisa was assuring him that she was putting some money away to buy one.

“Of course then you’d have to give up your shiny object addiction,” said Len, as Mick ran his fingers over a speedskating trophy she’d won while his back was turned. It was a pair of half-sized silver skates, one crossed over the other, glistening and freshly polished in a way that outclassed her smudged diploma plaque. “And we’ll have less space to hide the ones you flat-out steal.”

Dinner started awkward and moved into comfortable by the time Mick had drained his bowl of artisanal butternut squash soup from an artisanal can. They talked old times and old laughs, Lisa leveraging some innocent statement by Len into an innuendo before Mick dropped all subtlety and turned it into a dick joke.

The only interruption was when the two men both reached for the wine and Lisa’s hand snapped between them before they could touch, leaving a moment of unsettling silence before both men found the wherewithal to lean back again.

Then Lisa dropped another dick joke, and the tension started deflating. Just stay, her eyes were saying, even as her mouth discussed the city council members lobbying to mount a newly erected monument spire. The chill was still lingering under Mick’s skin, but despite it he felt warmer than he had in months.

Maybe years.


	7. How Do I Pronoun (And Not Die?)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Welp, I'm a dummy who put in a chapter ahead of time. Please read this BEFORE Chapter 8 if you don't mind.

Len hadn’t entirely expected Mick to say yes the next time he invited him out to a rich idiot socialization event, but their time apart had made him forget how little Mick cared to back down. He went around Len’s back to Lisa to request a tuxedo or whatever people wore to such to-dos and she had a tasteful tan and brown suit in size beefcake delivered to his house. It fit surprisingly comfortably across his broad shoulders. He even shaved properly to add some dignity to the situation.

Len was scheduled to show up at eight so Lisa had Mick show up at seven forty-five, for what Lisa called Mick’s ‘Pretty Woman’ moment and what Mick called ‘getting to see the look on Len’s face at Mick in anything resembling nice clothing’. Next time he’d stuff Len into dark glasses and a denim jacket and take him barcrawling as a fair turnabout.

He got into the elevator at the Aon Building and fiddled with his cufflinks. They were tiny bits of cheap metal that Lisa had commissioned an intern to get from the discount rack, etched with tiny little flames. Mick’s eyes wandered to the tiny TV screen on the elevator wall that was playing a commercial for business software. The news ticker beneath it announced proposed expansions to Gorilla City and continued investigations into the Star City vigilante titling himself ‘The Bowman’.

He was still fiddling when someone got into the elevator next to him, a tablet clutched against their chest and a canvas bag over their arm. The glint of snow-white hair caught Mick’s attention first, followed by the brachiating scars that radiated down their face.

“Didn’t I see you at the hospital?” Still couldn’t pick out boy or girl there. In an outfit like that, dapper suit with two tiny rings for earrings, the effect was probably intentional. Their short hair had grown out into pale dreadlocks held back in a ponytail.

Alex took a quick look at him, then a longer look, and then looked like they wanted to climb up the side of the elevator to get away from him.

“Um. Yeah, maybe,” they said. Mick offered Alex a grin, which did approximately zilch to calm the scared-rabbit look in their eyes. 

“They had me tied to the bed on the floor but not in the freaky way.”

“Oh, yeah. I, uh, I remember you.” The hand not holding the tablet was shaking—no, twitching. Little jerky motions, like the way a dying lightbulb flickered. Alex swallowed hard. “You had hypothermia, I think?”

Mick laughed. “Yup. I’m the one who tried to light up the hospital to warm up.”

Seriously. Boy or girl. People needed to project better so Mick’s brain could figure out what to do.

“I’m glad you’re feeling better,” Alex mumbled all in a rush. Their eyes fixated on the elevator TV as if the trailer for yet another War of the Americas documentary was the most interesting thing in the world.

“And you were the one all fidgety. Like you’d stuck a fork in an electric socket and it hadn’t quite worked its way out of your system.” Mick pointed at the convulsing hand. “Looks like it’s still in there, too.”

“Mmm. Kk.” The little noise of static finally came in concern with another twitch of the hand. “And you, you’re…you’re still…cold?” They let the final word linger with the weight of a clear euphemism. The elevator took another leisurely two floors while Mick worked on that one.

Oh, shit. So that was the twitching was about.

“Ah. Cold,” he said, as the elevator passed the fifth floor. He leaned his head back and forth, one hand making a so-so wobbling motion. “Yeah. Cold. Still have the cold in me. You still got the lightning?”

“Kk.” Alex gave a brief nod, almost a twitch of its own. “Yeah. Still. Still twitchy. Kk. It comes and goes. Not really worth much. Not planning on doing anything with it. It’s not doing anything. But it’s there. I don’t think it’s going to go away.”

“My cold’s pretty specified, anyway. Not exactly useful. I just feel like shit.”

“Same.” Another twitching nod, a tiny swallow. “Hope it works out for you.”

The world’s slowest elevator hit the seventh floor and opened onto a sea of expensive suits and inefficient dresses. Lisa Snart, Queen of the Central City Kingdom, was in the middle of a herd of hangers-on. Mick mentally pictured a school of fat fish all clustering and shoving to get at dropped crumbs, with big mouths agape and those little carp mustache things jerking around on their faces.

“Alex! Great, great, you’re here. Let’s all chat” Lisa gave Mick a fake smile and gestured him off into a corner. Alex trailed behind them, throwing off the twitching with a powerful force of will and throwing on their own false smile.

“Did you bring it?” Lisa asked under her breath. Alex pulled out a set of folded papers and pressed them into Lisa’s hands. Mick, used to catching casual sleight of hand, noted an unwrapped granola bar and a caffeine pill hiding between the pages. Lisa put her back to the room and stuffed the food quickly into her mouth.

“Life saver,” she mumbled, choking down the granola as Mick snickered. “Been on my feet all damn day. Mick, this is Alex Hawkins, my new PA. Cream of the politician herding crop. Alex, this is Mick, friend of the family.”

Mick saw the twitch starting to return, and clapped Alex on the shoulder hard enough to disrupt their static grunt. “Yeah, we met. Glad you’ve got someone keeping you from walking into walls.”

“Alex, can you go grab a soda or something? My stomach’s about to climb up my throat.”

Alex gave several twitching-nods and dove off through the sea of politics to do their queen proud.

“So your go-for there—“

“Alex is genderfluid, pronouns are they and them,” Lisa rattled off, with the tone of someone who’d had to repeat a line far too much. “Run with it, I’ll find you some 101 reading material later.”

Mick tilted his head. “I was gonna say metahuman, but pronouns are what now?” 

An enforced calm slammed down on Lisa’s face. Perfect blank. She leaned in to whisper, “You’re sure?”

Mick nodded. “We were at the hospital at the same time. Woman in the next bed was turning into a tree, your go-for was twitching all over. Probably where the scars came from.

“They said they were hit by lightning.”

“Yeah, but I’m pretty sure the lightning never left.” Mick shrugged. “Maybe that’s what made Alex a genderfluid too, I don’t know? Don’t they have surgery for that?”

“Crap.“ Lisa rose up on her toes to peek over the crowd, unable to see Alex’s pale dreads above the tide of balding heads. “They’re a really good PA, though,” she lamented, settling back down with a sigh. “I’ll worry about it when they start shorting out the printer. Come on, let’s go shake some hands.” She grabbed Mick’s arm and started dragging him towards the balding heads.

“Okay, but what’s this about gender fluids?”

Lisa delivered the aforementioned Gender 101 in between gladhanding and Mick dubbed the situation ‘weird but whatever’. He wondered, as Lisa continued to introduce him to people, how many other metahumans around the city were trying to go stealth like him and Len. They weren’t exactly capable of robbing banks by melting on each other. Maybe there was someone whose only power was making things soggy.

He kept up the entertainment by dropping a crass story or two on the men in tight ties and the women in dresses with carefully calculated necklines. Most of them found reasons to quickly be elsewhere but there were a few who would make low, jerking snickers and a rare precious angel actually made an even more lewd pun in return. Some of the blankly smiling masks had actual human beings hiding underneath them.

Another shark parted the crowd and Len slipped through to grasp the thin-skinned hand of the head of Fourth Second Bank. “Mick,” he said, with a nod and a smile that made Mick’s stomach twist, followed up by an affectionate side hug to his sister. Mick had never been so jealous of a hug in his life.

“How’s life in whatever it is you do?” he asked. Len waved a casual hand.

“The whatever’s going smoothly, as is the who-knows-what.”

“Great. So’s mine.”

The Fourth Second CEO cut in with a strongly worded question about Lisa’s taxation policy, and Len and Mick left her to her fate to seek out a quiet corner.

Len’s gaze went down to Mick’s shoes and leisurely trailed back up again. “You don’t look half bad in a suit.”

“Stop lying, Len.”

“Fine. You look like a mobster’s enforcer. But not an unattractive bouncer.” Len led him past a set of meeting rooms and over to the service elevator. He slipped a key into the lock above the control pad and twisted it, then pressed the up button. “The man that owns this building has an office a floor up,” he murmured. “He keeps his data locked up tight but not so tight I don’t have a few people who know how to crack into it. He’s put a lot of money up against Lisa’s tax policies, but my friend knows how to trace back and that money and find out how to get it away from him.”

“You’re gonna do a heist? Right here, right now?” Mick sounded almost giddy. Len extended an arm to escort Mick into the empty elevator. 

“No time like the present,” he purred.

This could be all right, Mick thought, as both men reflexively took their places at the far corners of the elevator and it slowly began to rise. Even with the metahuman thing. He could live with this.

Halfway to the next floor, the lights in the elevator went out. Len jabbed the up button again, then the emergency stop.

 _Great_ , thought Mick. “Looks like Lisa’s new secretary decided to go snack on the fusebox. Might not have been the best hiring decision.”

“No regrets from me, it’s a nightmare trying to find a decent PA in this town.” Len slammed his hand on the wall as Mick tried to catch a peek through the door. “If I use the call button they’re going to wonder why we’re here. Damnit.”

A loud boom came from the floor below them. The elevator shook, bouncing like a yo-yo on its cable as the two men were tossed against the wall.

Mick swore and fell into Len. There was a brief burst of warmth where they touched. The elevator jerked against its cable, sent Mick flying away again, and dropped several feet as the sound of screaming filtered through the metal doors.

Mick let out another stream of curses as he crawled towards Len, grabbing his leg as the tilted elevator screeched against the walls of the shaft. “What the hell is going on?”

“I think the cable’s breaking!” Len shouted back, hands going unbidden to curl in Mick’s suit jacket. “We need to get the door open!”

The elevator fell another half floor. As Mick tried to get to his feet another explosion punched a dent in the doors, swinging the elevator sideways.

“Shit…” The metal was smoking with the heat of the blast, too warped and hot to pull apart. The doors were enough to see feet running in terror but there wasn’t enough space to squeeze through and join them. Mick thought of how smoke killed more people than flame, of how you should always take the stairs in an emergency, of how many firefighters it took to wedge open the door of even the most pristine of elevators.

Above the noise he could just barely hear the creaking of the strained elevator cable.

“Mick.” Len’s voice was still as ice. It was the tone you heard when you ran out of fear, because fear was there to help motivate your escape and when you ran out of escape you had nothing left but the calm. Mick nodded to what was left unsaid. 

“Thought I’d die with more fire.” Mick said slowly.

“Thought I’d catch a bullet.” Len took one slow, deliberate step across the angled elevator and stood in the middle of it, staring down at his old friend. “We’ve got a few seconds until we bite it, old friend,” he said. Still as ice, but Mick could feel the warmth drawing him closer. Len’s hand was only inches away from his face.

“Might as well not waste it,” Mick said, as more explosions echoed in his ears. The screams faded away. All he could see were Len’s ice-hazel eyes flickering in the dim light.

“We’ve wasted years,” said Len.

“No time like the present.”

Mick’s hand slipped around Len’s shoulder, the other ran up the back of Len’s soot-stained blazer. Len’s fingers settled on his hips. So warm. So good.

Mick leaned in to rest his head on Len’s shoulder, and finally gave in to the urge to melt.


	8. Sublimation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I uploaded this before I uploaded the last chapter and somehow people thought it still made sense? This was unintentional. Please read chapter 7 before this chapter.

That gap in the elevator wasn’t nearly as tiny as he’d thought, he mused. Definitely big enough to slip through. He pulled the floating parts of himself together and flowed through the crack, slipping out just as the elevator cable finally snapped and plummeted down to say hello to the basement.

That really could have been messy. He stared down the shaft at the twitching, sparking cables until the sound of screaming behind him drew his attention again. People were pleading for mercy as chunks of the ceiling fell down, trapping a woman with shoes too ridiculous to let her run away.

Lisa. Fuck, where the hell was Lisa. He flowed across the room in a rapid stream of himself, checking the faces of the injured for the hard eyes that had made him bow ceaselessly to every whim their owner desired.

“It’s what you get! It’s what you fucking get!” Someone else was screaming, but at least this one didn’t sound about to pass out from terror. At the other end of the room was a woman with a pixie cut with jet blue tips and an attitude you could sharpen a butcher knife on. She was wearing a ragged denim jacket with tattered cuffs that exposed a dragonfly tattoo on one wrist as she scooped up a chunk of rubble. 

“Please, we haven’t done anything,” whimpered someone cowering under a tipped-over palm tree half his size.

“You locked us up in that shitty-ass meta prison, didn’t you?” The woman tossed the rubble back and forth between her hands. A soft glow began to build up around it. “Like you fuckers even needed that money. It’s all insured anyway, so what the fuck do you care?”

_(Not really how that works/okay that’s not really a priority here/Lisa’s not here/shit I remember her from the news. Catalyst, I think that’s it, makes things go boom/oh shit)_

The chunk of charged-up rubble began to hum and Catalyst launched it at a group of clustered men hiding by the podium. The moment it hit the floor it went off like a miniature grenade, sending one man screaming to the ground with shrapnel through his leg.

Catalyst cackled. “What. You. Fucking. Get.”

He tried to ask what exactly these particular people were ‘getting’ it for, possibly for having bad booze and worse company, but found his mouth wasn’t working. Actually, he didn’t have a mouth at all. Should probably work on that.

Catalyst pulled a set of marbles from her pocket and was rubbing them between her palms as he focused hard on pulling himself together. Okay. He needed mouth, a face, probably some arms. Legs to match. Probably ought to stop her or something. 

He focused hard on squishing the looser pieces of himself together. Catalyst stopped the rubbing of her hands to stare as his dissipated form began to condense down. Her head slowly tilted to one side. “What the goddamn hell are you?”

There, arms and face. Had a mouth for talking with. Eyes also, though his vision felt a little odd. “On the guest list, is what I am,” he said with his condensed face, slurring the first few words until he got his shape under control. 

“You’re a meta, right, Steamy? And you’re with these douchebags?” She waved her hand at the bleeding, whimpering crowd. “Come on, we can do what we want, yeah? Help me rip this town apart.”

_(Do I have a name?/Steam is dumb/I can get a better one later/PRIORITIES STEAMY)_

He made his new face form an expression of consideration, head tilting to one side. Then the shoulders shrugged.

“Eh. No.”

Catalyst offered a return ‘oh well’ shrug and a ‘fair enough’ rocking nod. “Then you can burn too,” she said casually, and lobbed the marbles at his fast like a fastball pitcher. 

_(Should we move/think we’ll be fine/yeah, we’ll be fine)_

The marbles broke him up into chunks of mist, only for him to pull himself back together again and rebuild his face.

A quip should go here. Steam was divided on what kind to make. Catalyst backed away, eyes wide as she scrambled for a larger piece of artillery, and he stalked towards her on hazy legs.

“Shouldn’t do that,” he grunted, and raised a newly formed arm to point at her.

_(What am I doing?/I think this’ll work/gotta make her cool down right)_

A plume of soft crystals erupted from his fingers like water from a broken fire hydrant, wrapping Catalyst’s hands in ice the instant it touched her. The metahuman let out a screech that made Steam briefly dissipate his own ears. “Fuck! Fuck you!” She fell to the ground, wrapped around her frostbitten hand.

“Not my thing,” he said, and knocked her flat with one icy fist. “I don’t like most of these assholes, but there’s one in here I’d murder for.” He flexed his fingers and the ice fell to the ground in thin shards. Around him, the people cowering in the corners began to cautiously stand up, still pressed against the walls and flinching when he turned his eyes (he had eyes, right?) on them. 

“Who are you?” asked Alderman Blood. “Do you…do you come in peace?”

_(Does he really have to talk to me like I’m eight/ignore him like I always do)_

Steam doled out a few token orders to call emergency services and left the suits and dresses to handle themselves. You always had to pick out a specific person to do the dialing, or else everyone would assume someone else would do it, and then no one did it, and then the only one cleaning up the mess would be you.

“Are you with the meta?” asked a reedy man in thick glasses, stumbling over every other word. 

“Are you _dense_?” Steam gestured emphatically at the bomb woman crumpled at his feet. The man coughed, then set his face in a firm attempt to (even in the face of being ice-stiff) still be right. 

“So you’ll stop the other one, right?”

“What other one?”

From two rooms over, Steam heard a loud, pitch-perfect, Hammer Horror Classic Collection wolf’s howl.

“Ah. That one.” 

Walking felt strange, when he could so easily float but he made himself keep his legs cohesive as he strode across the foyer (that was such a pretentious word) into the glass-roofed atrium (the what?). There were people hiding behind potted plants and decorative fountains who huddled with knees to their chest as he passed by them. The tips of Alex’s bone-white hair were barely visible above the edge of the dessert cart, paired with the softest ‘kkk kkk kkk’ noise of static.

The howls became snarls and he heard the loud thud of large feet across an increasingly less stable floor as the second meta bounded into the room with dripping jaws.

Right, Catalyst had a partner. He really ought to watch the news more.

_(I do it every day, I have to be aware of current EVENTS/HOLY SHIT PRIORITIES SHUT UP SELF THERE IS A WEREWOLF HERE.)_

Feral was a good eight feet tall even with the way he hunched, with lanky limbs that didn’t seem to bend in the right places. His body was covered with dense, dark brown fur that grew spiky along his back and crept up his pointed ears. The gnarled, clawed fingers at the end of his long hands were stained red, as were the teeth that bulged out of a jaw that could barely contain them. It was hard to pick out if there was anything human about the way the werewolf’s yellow eyes looked at him.

Damn thing seemed pretty mad, though. Steam stared the thing down, and Feral cocked his head in brief confusion before full-on charging him with a roar.

_(This is probably gonna feel weird for both of us.)_

Heavy jaws bit down and found themselves chewing sparkling vapor as Steam let himself fall out of cohesion again, relaxing into the comfortable warm wind that blew in from the flaming electrical lines. 

“Sorry, I’m a zero calorie snack,” he said, maintaining a mouth just long enough to get in a quip before the claws shredded his outline again. He laughed as Feral pawed at the air in futility. It reminded him of a video he’d seen of a dog trying to catch bubbles. The room was clearing out as the guests took advantage of Feral’s distraction.

“Okay, night-night time.” The ice formed again on his left arm. As Feral leaned in for another flail he swung his arm up to smash against the massive head, expecting him to go down like a sack of furry potatoes. 

Feral didn’t flinch. His head twisted and bit down on the ice, severing the arm with a single bite and sending shards flying. 

Steam stumbled backwards on half-formed feet. “Shit.” Okay. Not gonna work.

Feral’s next growl was almost a laugh, gurgling and low in his throat. Clearly there was enough human in there to understand the concept of ‘fuck you’.

_(Can’t hurt me, I can’t hurt him./Come on. That hair looks flammable, not gonna freeze him out but can I at least toss him into the wall/he’s too damn big/we’re fireproof but he’s not/fire’s not the answer to everything/well it’s damn well the answer to most things and the last thing I want is more ice—)_

Steam’s other hand snapped upward as Feral came in for another chomp, and he was treated to the delights of knowing what it was like to hear a dog scream. The bared skin around Feral nose and ears was scalded sickly red as he he fell backwards against the ruined buffet tables, clawing at his face.

_(What the hell did I do this time/finally, it’s warming up up in here!)_

Steam pulled himself together, only to disintegrate his hand again as Feral’s hands flew up to block the next blast of boiling vapor. He kept the heat on as he walked towards Feral, taking some satisfaction in watching him writhe on the floor. Seemed to be animal cruelty, but that probably didn’t count as bad PR when the animal was pretty damn cruel too.

“Time to go back to the pound, puppy dog—“

Feral’s hand abruptly snapped out and knocked away the tipped-over dessert cart. His next grab caught Alex around the waist and pulled them close to his chest. The bulging jaws seemed to be trying to form words, but they came out as distorted yowls.

_(Shit/shit)_

“Human shield? Really? With your brawn?” taunted Steam. Right, gotta save the PA. Lisa liked Alex. Probably shouldn’t make the one employee she liked collateral damage. Alex curled into a streaky ball, trying to breathe as the claws dug deeper into their suit jacket. “Put them down and fight like a man. Or a wolf-man, whatever the hell you are.”

_(My banter game is not strong today.)_

Feral stood, baring his fangs in a grin. He pointed with his free paw to the cracked, sparking fire exit sign above the stairwell, then to Alex with their scraped-up legs dangling in the air, then made an emphatic chomp a few inches from Alex’s head. As hostage situations went, he’d made a fair list of demands and consequences for not fulfilling them.

_(Can’t let him leave/okay so what’s the plan/we need to find Lisa not play hero/yeah but it’s _my_ city and who the hell is this asshole trying to tear a hole through it)_

Blood was beginning to congeal on Alex’s knees. They looked to the literally-steaming-in-rage metahuman in front of them and then to the room around them, scanning for witnesses. The “kkk kkk” was getting louder, and Steam wasn’t sure it was the wolfman she was scared of.

“You’re not going to just walk out of here,” Steam said, raising his voice to cover the sound of the static.

“Grrr roow rrrr,” Feral rebutted, taking a defiant step backwards. Steam took one forward and Feral took two backwards in response, locking eyes with him as he bared his jaws. The twitching of Alex’s hands became rhythmic convulsions, back and forth, light flickering across their eyes.

“Kkk—kkk—kkk…” Alex finally looked back to the raging mass of vapor, and broke through the static just long enough to say, “You can’t tell.”

Feral lit up like a 5000 watt spotlight. The werewolf convulsed as the lightning coursed down Alex’s dreads and poured from their hands. Alex’s eyes glowed like tiny suns in their sockets. Their fingers clamped down on Feral’s fur even with paralyzed claws digging into their sides.

_(Okay. That’s damn cool/don’t taze me bro hahah)_

The arms around Alex began to shed their fur and shrivel, revealing the soft pink beneath them. Feral shrank into himself until Alex’s feet touched the ground, then toppled backwards as his wolf features retreated into a human body. Bereft of fur he was a reasonably attractive naked man in his twenties, blond. Alex’s outline was burned into his arms and chest. The faint sense of grilled meat hung in the air.

“Think I blew my fuse…” Alex mumbled as they rolled off the post-werewolf. Steam extended an orange hand to help them up, and an arm to drag them over to the corner.

“I’ll find you a charger cable later,” Steam promised. He was rippling with restrained laughter. That was badass.

“What are you?” They were halfway to passing out in his arms.

“Somewhere between liquid and gaseous. You seen the mayor?”

“Went to bathroom, right before stuff went boom.” Alex’s head lolled against his arm. “Won’t tell?”

“No, I won’t.”

“Don’t I know you?”

“Hell, even I don’t know me yet.”

Steam propped Alex up against the wall next to the fountain and scorned a new set of legs in favor of traveling on the breeze, rushing in a colored haze towards the restrooms. A statue of Guanyin (who?/we will discuss world religions _later_ okay) had fallen across the door, but the crack underneath was perfectly big enough to slip through with ease.

Thank fuck. There was Lisa with mussed hair and suit jacket tossed aside, trying to unscrew the metal paper towel holder to get something approaching a weapon. She stumbled backwards over her discarded heels as he flowed into the room. 

“What the—“

“It’s okay, Lisa! It’s okay, it’s me.” Steam reformed and held his hands up. He’d hug her if she wouldn’t kick his ass for it. “Are you all right?”

“Who the hell is me?”

“It’s…” He looked down at himself. He’d managed an orange-flowing-to-blue torso but below that he was still a swirling mass of vapor. “You know. It’s me. Come on, you know me.”

“Who’s. Me,” Lisa said with gritted jaw. She was smaller than normal, he noted. Actually, everyone was smaller. Maybe he should get shorter?

“I’m me. Come on, little sister. It’s me.”

“I’m only one person’s ‘little sister’.” Lisa’s words were slow as she put one foot behind her and leaned backwards. yet.

“Well, I’m your…uh.”

_(I should really figure out how this works in relation to heritage.)_

Lisa reversed her previous step to move up to him and held her hand out, slowly moving in to touch his chest. Her fingers passed easily through the vapor, then knocked against Steam’s chest when he solidified again.

“Lenny?” she asked, in a small voice that hardly befitted a capable mayor.

He tilted his head to the side, fingers trailing away into steam as he tried to work that one out. “Not. Yes but no? Some of it” 

_(Not Len but some of Len I’ve got Len here but what)_

Lisa took a few more steps around him, circumnavigating his body. “Are you Mick?”

“Yes but no?” 

_(Lots of Mick but not exactly Mick)_

“It’s. I’m me, right?” Steam tried again, hands held out as he searched for decent wording. He was himself.

“Oh, _Jesus_.” Lisa ran a hand through her hair and he felt the urge to give her his comb to clean it up. Except no comb, no pockets. Could he make pockets? Something to consider later. “You two touched, didn’t you? This is…” She waved her hand at him. “This is what was trying to happen, wasn’t it? This thing you did.”

Okay, _that_ was a definite yes. Steam gave her a hard nod. “Yeah, they touched. And then a thing happened. And then there was me.”

Lisa went through a few more curses, swapping briefly to French just to vary it up. “And so you’re Len and Mick in a weird freaky blender,” she said as she paced the crumbling bathroom.

“I’m _me_ ,” he insisted. “Len and Mick are part of me but I’m not Len and Mick. I’m me. And you’re a little of a mess yourself, sis.”

“ _I’m_ a mess? Have you seen yourself? Yourselves, whatever the fuck?” She pointed at the mirror behind him. 

“Can we just get out of here and discuss this later?”

“No. Look at yourself, seriously. Whoever you are now. Micklen or whatever.” She pointed to the mirror. “Look at what the fuck you two did.”

Steam turned, rolling what were maybe eyes, to give his visage to the mirror. The mirror tossed him back a vision of a tall figure with mottled orange and blue skin, standing a full foot and a half higher than Lisa. His face was not Mick’s face or Len’s face, though he could see elements of both in there, as if some freakish act of medicine had created a child between them. He had two sets of eyes, one set on top of the other, and they blinked in unison at the mirror’s odd offering. His left arm was light blue, almost clear, like thick ice. The right was a burning orange and steam trailed from his fingertips until he made a conscious decision for it to stop.

“…well,” he said after a long silence. “That’s weird.”

“I should call you the Understatement,” said Lisa as she stepped back into her shoes. She was so tiny next to his reflection. He wanted to protect her (he’d always wanted to protect her) but she was standing up so tall and powerful on her own (queen bitch of the world, like he always knew she’d be) and it was hard not to feel whatever passed for his heart liquefy briefly with pride.

Her pointed overexpensive black pumps kicked him in the shin. “Turn back into Mick and Len. Right now,” she insisted. “Split up. Undo what you did.”

Well. Well, yes, he could do that, but. No. The very idea felt like knives in him.

“I don’t want to.” He wrapped the ice-blue arm around himself, hunching inward. It was so nice, like this. How it should be, not cold, not warm, just perfect. “I won’t be me, if I split. Just them. Alone.”

“They were getting along just fine before you. Split up. We need to go home.” Every word was enunciated hard and sharp.

“Later, okay? A little later? I’ve just figured this out, I want to be like this.” Where would he go, if they split apart? Could they put him back together again? Existing was really, really nice, he didn’t feel like giving it up so soon.

“Mick. _Len_.” Lisa smacked him hard on the blue arm. “Either you split up or the second I get out of here I’m going to go up to the first emergency worker I see and kick him square in the balls.”

The four eyes blinked. “What?”

“I mean it. In front of every camera I can round up, and I’ll see if I can’t make it a war hero too. Then I’m sticking my tongue down my secretary’s throat. Split the fuck up or I’m torpedoing my mayoral reputation via high heel castration. I want my brother back.” She stamped her foot hard on the concrete. “ _Now_ , assholes.”

_(That would be just hilarious/are you insane do you know what that would do to/do you really keep her on a leash like that/I worked so hard and she’s going to throw a tantrum to/I gotta give her props for having the guts to even try so stop being such a stick up the)_

A crack like a fault line went through Steam, splitting him down the middle, exploding him into vapor, and ripping his mind apart at the seams. The two abruptly physical men went flying in opposite directions with Len hitting the sink and Mick rolling into the handicapped stall.

“Ow,” they announced in unison.

“Fucking took you long enough,” said Lisa, walking from one man to the other so she could slap them both hard enough to leave marks. “What the hell was that thing?”

“Dunno. We had to get out of the elevator. Figured it was that or fall to our horrible burning deaths.”

Lisa flinched. “Stop. Stop that. Holy shit, stop that.” 

“Stop what?”

“Shut the fuck up!”

It was only then that Mick realized, as Lisa pointed to the both of them, that he and Len had been speaking at the same time. Whatever they’d been before they weren’t that anymore, but he could still feel pieces of Len floating around in his head. He knew how much those shoes Lisa had threatened an EMT’s manhood with had cost, and what the words haut couture meant, and he really wanted to go home to bed.

Len pressed his hand to where the sink had left a cut on his temple. Mick bit his tongue to keep quiet and Len did some brotherly fussing with the words Mick wanted to use to comfort Lisa himself. Rather than be comforted, she drafted the both of them into shoving the door open. 

“Who the hell is Guanyin?” Mick asked as the statue scraped across the floor. Len gritted his teeth.

“Chinese goddess of mercy,” he grunted. “Buddhist figure. Reliever of suffering. Traditionally depicted as male, female, or both.”

“The hell is with everyone not picking a side and sticking with it today?”

“Let’s not piss off the goddess we probably want on our side right now,” said Lisa, and Guanyin obligingly let themselves be shifted far enough to let the three squeeze out of the bathroom.

Lisa’s hair was a mess. Len was covered in concrete dust. They looked perfect in a way that Mick couldn’t put his finger on, standing in the epicenter of chaos with looks that said they owned the place. If this was is what they saw in themselves when they took to a podium, points for a messy useless city to center around…okay, so Mick could maybe see the appeal of politics.

The screams had died down, replaced by the sound of sirens. The lingering pieces of Len assured Mick that reporters would be gathering outside like vultures.

“Right,” Lisa said, fingercombing her hair. “Metahuman related incident. A good time to step in and take a leadership position. Hard on crime, acknowledging contributions of good meta-Samaritans. Etcetera et cetera bullshit ad nauseaum.”

Len wiped his hand across his face, smearing blood and dirt across his cheek. His gaze was sharpening again. “Hey, Mick. You feel like doing PR work?”

“Nope.”

“You feel like free beers?”

“Can deal with that.”

“Okay, let’s roll with this.”


	9. Hot News Item

Metahumans always made for great news stories. Even if you couldn’t get them on film you’d get great footage of a witness breathlessly describing the freakish thing that had attacked them, shaking their head with a mixture of remembered fear choking their words and giddiness at getting to actually be on TV. The image of the mayor’s injured brother being carried out of a smoking building didn’t make for a bad shot either, with Mayor Snart herself under one of his arms and an unknown firefighter who someone finally looked up to classify as a two-time hero supporting him on the other. 

Mick made a few casual statements to the press about just doing his job and being thankful there wasn’t a greater loss of life—more eloquent than usual, because there was still some small impulse in the back of his mind that said he needed to look appropriately blue-collar hero for the cameras. Len let himself be treated but was emphatically against the idea of visiting the hospital, catching himself one choked ‘gg’ before it morphed into ‘goddamn’ as he fought back an uncharacteristic hatred of medical professionals.

Lisa, of course, gave appropriately professional statements and then texted her head speechwriter to get something prepped ASAP because she did not have the headspace to pull it together right now. Also that Alex deserved a raise, some Paid Time Off, and possibly a box of chocolates for ‘poise under fire’.

“It reminds me of that look she had when she was a little kid,” Mick said to Lenny as he lounged beside the mayor’s car. Len was pressing an ice pack to his temple to bring the swelling down, the door hanging open so he could keep an eye on the situation and remain photogenic. “Back there, I mean. She’d make this face where you knew she was about to start bawling but she was giving you that chance to step in and give her what she wanted to make her stop. She only made that face for you, though. Never for Dad, because all he’d give her was a knock on the head.”

“You didn’t know her when she was that young,” said Len, eyes flicking upward and narrowing. His suit jacket was spread out across his lap. Even with dried blood on his face he looked like a lounging model from the magazines Mick used to catch a few of the guys at the station looking at. Mick had wondered for the longest time why the magazine spent so much camera time on fancy suits you would never wear when you were out on the road or skimpy clothes that would give you horrific road rash. Emily finally sat him down and explained the matter with a simple ‘because erections that’s why’. People with sex drives were fucking morons.

He touched his own temple. “I know. I still remember it. Or at least I remember remembering it—the stuff out of your head’s starting to fade out.” He snorted. “Which is good because I really do not want to be in your head that badly.”

Len shook his head, then winced as he felt his brain knocking against the sides of his skull. “What did we do in there? It felt like we were a different person.” He swapped the ice pack to the other hand.

“Think we were. Like there wasn’t you and me, just that thing. That…guy. Steam or whatever.” It had been a person. Not Mick, not Len, more like the both of them in a blender, but also something bigger than the both of them.

“We should probably be more creeped out about it then we were. Losing ourselves like that.”

“Not losing. More like…becoming whole. Becoming better.” Len’s gaze fell away from Mick and his voice grew soft. “I liked it.”

“Me too,” said Mick, his voice like rough stone. “I wouldn’t want to do it forever, but…I’d like it again. Sometime. Like, when we both get back home. I liked it.” Just hold that wholeness for a few hours, savor it, carry the memory of it when he went to work and out to the bar. 

“When we get home. Right now, I think I can keep it together.” Len reached out a hand to him, then stopped, eyes darting around the area. Looking for cameras, Jesus Christ, Len. Can’t have a handholding scandal today, now can we?”

Len leaned over to take the hand Mick was already extending in return. The contact held. His skin was damp and cold against Mick’s warm flesh. No vapor. Just skin on skin, and Mick felt that pull again but he didn’t have to dissolve. It was just there. If he wanted it. When he wanted it.

“I don’t feel cold anymore,” he said.

“I’m not heating up, either. The ice pack’s starting to numb my fingers up.”

“I want to do it again,” Mick pressed on. His fingers were curling tight around Len’s fingers, slippery with condensation from the ice pack. The urge was there, yeah. He could do it again if he wanted to, like slipping easily into a hot bath. He knew how, the way he knew how to move his own limbs. “God, this  
is completely insane.”

“I know. But that’s never stopped me from doing stuff before.”

“Later. Later.” Len’s fingers squeezed him hard.

“I want _you_.”

“I know. And you were in my head. You know what I want, and I know what you want.”

“That beer you promised me?"

“That too.”

***

“I mean, ice _and_ steam? How are you supposed to trust a guy that runs hot and cold?” 

Mick lay splayed out on the sofa as Jesse James, mouthed off on the morning news. 

“So what are we going to call this one, James?” asked James’s cohost, a straight man so bland that Mick couldn’t even remember his name. They might actually have changed him since the last time he’d bothered watching CCBN’s morning shows. “Hot-and-Cold?”

“I’d suggest Icy Hot but I think that one might be copyrighted!” Most of the Central City metahumans got their name from the wildest hairstyle basic cable had to offer. “Fahrenheit? Nah, he’s not fair in height at all! Why don’t we go with Celsius, because he’s _see_ -ing Central City’s second worst power couple off to a prison _cell_!” Jesse let out a high pitched giggle, and his cohost responded with the most inoffensive of committee-developed laughs.

“He went with Celsius,” Mick called out to the kitchen. 

“Better than King Shark!” Len called back, whisking a few sprinklings of cinnamon into a bowl of scrambled eggs.

“Our guy’s probably going to have an opinion on it.”

“It’s not like he came up with anything better. Steam sounds like a gay nightclub.”

Lisa looked up from where she was reviewing proposed school funding legislation on her tablet. Holographic projections of socioeconomic diagrams hovered around her. “You guys talk like he’s a different person.” She removed the funding for music programs and frowned at the shifting of the little bar graphs.

“He is,” said Len. The frying pan hissed as raw egg was inflicted upon its innocent surface. “It’s like we’re not exactly us anymore. There’s just one person, both parts of us.”

“And this isn’t really isn’t freaky to either of you?

Mick clicked the TV off and stretched out, feet up on the coffee table. “You’re the one who likes getting naked and sticky with other naked people, Lisa. At least Celsius isn’t us having actual sex.”

“Are you slutshaming my sister?”

“You can’t tell me this is weirder than actual sex.”

“You’re the statistical minority here, Mick. Just putting it out there.” She reached out to pull some money out of the sales tax pool, then paused. “…you did it last night, didn’t you. God, I haven’t seen you two assholes this relaxed in years.”

The two men’s shoulders rose and fell in perfect unison. When they’d finally made it back to Lisa’s house they’d fallen into bed next to each other, Mick barely bothering to take his shoes off, and then they’d fallen right back into each other.

Pulling apart again was easier the second time, and after that they’d slept like the dead.

The hissing of the eggs settled down into gentle bubbling and was finally quiet as Len deposited it next to the toast. Mick took another pull of the mimosa Lisa had mixed up for him under the excuse that orange juice was full of helpful nutrients.

The silence was broken by the thump of Lisa tossing her tablet aside.

“You know what, fine. Show me. I still think this is weird as hell.”

Len slipped out of the kitchen, one eyebrow up. “Merge with another man. In front of my own sister? Oh, I’m not sure, it’s so scandalous.”

Mick spread one arm and gestured at him with his wineglass. “Come on, Len. Mayor’s orders.”

Len put his hand to his mouth ever so delicately. “I’m not sure I can do it now. I have stagefright.”

“Len, I will tackle your ass to the ground if you don’t get over here.”

“Well, when you ask nicely.” Len perched on the arm of the chair, prim and proper like a school marm, until Mick dragged him down off the couch to sprawl on top of him. Len pretended to punch him until slaps became caresses and skin became bright droplets of water vapor that burst into the air and swirled upward into a brilliant tornado of ochre and azure.

Lisa watched as the metahuman condensed in front of him, all four eyes bright and kind.

“Hi. Again.” She raised one hand for a tentative wave.

“Hi.” The metahuman waved back, the vapor training behind his fingers. It was hard not to fidget either. “So, I guess I’m Celsius now. Nice to meet you.” He felt like a boyfriend meeting the parents.

Lisa reached up, hand almost trembling, and touched Celsius’s cheek. “You feel…I’m not even sure what you feel like. You feel like dry ice looks. Solid, but hazy.” Her fingers ran down to his shoulder and rested there. “You have Len’s memories in there?”

“I have Len’s everything. And Mick’s everything. And more than that, I think. It’s…complicated.”

“What’s your favorite ice cream flavor?” she fired off.

“It’s—Len’s is starlight mint. Mick likes chocolate milkshakes.” Celsius touched his mouth. “I, uh, don’t think I can eat. I suppose I could try. I haven’t tried a lot of things yet.”

Her fingers reached higher to touch him between his upper and lower right eyes. “You get that this is weird for me. My brother just disintegrated.”

“I’d tell you he’s safe inside me but there’s no way that doesn’t make it sound even more unsettling.”

“I’m gonna need him back eventually. And Mick too, I need someone to drink up all the crap beer we bought for him.”

“I will.” Celsius gave her a firm, hard nod. “I like being me, but they like being them, too. I can handle only being around for special occasions.”

“What happens to you when they split up?”

“I stop existing, I guess. There’s no ‘me’ until they join up again.”

“And that’s not…weird for _you_?” Lisa asked. “Not existing?”

Celsisus smiled. “Well, I don’t really notice except when I start existing again. And I’m still in them, somewhere. I think.” Celsius held out the bright orange hand to her, and then the ice-blue one. He took a deep breath, or feigned one, with lungs that didn’t exist except in the hypothetical. “They love you,” he said.

“No shit,” said Lisa.


End file.
